…and continues to save it. It was a place to put my grief when it wasn’t shared in my family of origin. In it, I could see a whole show about people who were living difficult lives, and I could see myself in their emotional lives. In many ways, my life was so much easier than theirs. I wasn’t living in the middle of the French revolution, I wasn’t living in a slum. And in so many ways, we were exactly the same. We both had more grief than we knew what to do with. I remember sitting in the theater watching Fantine die, and I sobbed and sobbed. I was able to watch a show where people explored difficult emotions, and respected them. More than respected them, brought them into life through the story and music of Les Misérables. And I believe that it saved my life. As a matter of fact, it’s continuing to save my life now. I am listening to the soundtrack and I can spend time with these characters who are going through significant life struggles. And I can think of the writers of the book that inspired the musical, and the writers of the musical, who saw that this was important enough to bring it to life. So I get to sit in the presence of all those who worked to bring this show to life — write, produce, perform, etc. — so that my younger self would have a place to put the hard emotions that my family of origin had trouble making space for.

So, thank you to all who were involved in the creation of Les Mis, and thank you for giving the boy and the man that I was and am a place to connect with the universal grief, which is the flip side of love. And that has been a hard lesson to learn, especially since I don’t think that dad experienced those feelings in the way that I, and more emotionally healthy people do. That interaction with dad, and the lack of that connection between love and grief, and to paying attention to that which brings me energy, made my life difficult. I am learning to listen to my body and my emotions, which brings its own difficulty, but this difficulty is driven by the things that are important to me. And I’m learning that this is the way to keep moving through life, as I continue to shed some of the faulty lessons that I learned growing up. The lesson that I needed to put myself second. Dad was first. Dad was always first. So I put myself second.

In Les Mis, there were many characters who were going through their own very significant challenges, but like in Fantine’s death scene, she does what she can to give her daughter a better life. And that feels like the other theme that I connected with. And my parents tried to give me a better life, but it was unbalanced because of dad’s lack of awareness of an inner emotional life, one which pointed the way. Mom tried to protect me from things, and without an emotionally healthy dad, I wasn’t able to find the middle ground of following that which was important to me, even if it came with risks. Especially because all life comes with risks. There’s the risk of moving too fast and outrunning the community, the risk of staying too long and becoming stagnant, and so on. So I lived small, which seemed like the safe thing to do, with all this danger outside and inside myself.

And today is the day that this ends. I have been working on this for a while, but it took me some time to come to terms with that fact that the risk of truly separating from dad is no longer worth any potential future benefit of interaction with him. Maybe this will change in the future, but for the moment, that’s where I am.

He took me as far as he could on this journey, and today is the day that I move forward as myself. Bringing the things I learned from him, but discarding those things of his that don’t fit in my life. And, while it feels profoundly unsafe, I have prepared myself. I have done the work. I have lived into my truth. And I am terrified, but it’s me being terrified by myself, by my power, rather than by dad’s power. And I’m applying my power in ways that are important to me, and that will continue to increase in importance to me.